The consolations of philosophy

Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in 523 while in prison awaiting execution^[1]. In it, Philosophy, personified as a woman, visits him in his prison cell and talks him down from his despair. She explains where true happiness is to be found. Not with fickle Fortune, who has abandoned him, but with constant Philosophy and virtue, which no one can take from him. It's a wonderful book^[2], but I'm not mentioning to suggest this amazing work of early Christian Neoplatonism is the book for the moment. Nor do I mention it just because Boethius was an incredible badass who stuck to his principles, though he was!

I mention it because when I woke up on Wednesday and checked the news, I thought well, fuck, and what now? And very soon after that I also thought, how can I make sense of this? And how can I deal with what happens next? Then, very like Boethius, I took consolation in my philosophy, which is that knowledge is power. I always think, if only I knew a little bit more, I could surely figure this out. Or, if I could just understand it, maybe I could deal with it better. That kind of thinking can be a trap--it's how I get stuck reading low quality hot takes and other people's panic just to get some news. But there are some things I've read that helped, and so I'm going to suggest them.

Understand the Cake or Death theory of change #

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies. 2024.

Davies' book is a kind of light intro into management cybernetics, in as far as an intro into a theory of complex systems can be light. One of the big ideas of cybernetics is that a system only responds to the signals it is capable of receiving. If the system is not complex enough--not capable of receiving and responding to enough of a variety of signals to deal with the situations it encounters--it will eventually fail catastrophically. He uses voting, and specifically the Brexit vote as an example. People were not happy with the status quo but couldn't send a complex enough signal back up to the ruling powers and have it acted on. When the only signal people can send is a vote every few years for this thing or something else, if they think this thing is terrible, they will vote for something else just to shake things up even if that something else is also terrible and quite possibly even more terrible. It's like the old joke about Cake or Death, except the cake has all run out, or is totally rotten and will give you the runs, and everyone just mashed the NOT CAKE button as hard as they could, disregarding that NOT CAKE is the same as DEATH. It's not like there's a "neither, thanks" button. It's still horrible, of course, but somehow understanding it a bit helps.

The book explains a lot of other aspects of our multicrisis quite well, too, and I highly recommend it.

Prepare to resist lies and feel-bad stories #

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz. 2024.

By diving into the history of psychological warfare, Newitz provides a way to identify, understand, and resist psychological warfare. The goal of psychological warfare is to confuse and demoralize the enemy, and American political actors started to turn it on their own people. One quick way to identify a PsyOp is if the story makes you feel complete despair, like you might as well just give up and die. Another way is if the story seems at odds with reality or history as you know it and experienced it, and makes you feel more and more confused as you try to figure it out. Even if you try to unpick it and succeed, it just wastes your time, as a new lie clad in partial truths comes along from the PsyOp machine. My summary hardly gives it justice and I strongly suggest reading the book in the next three months. Stories are weapons, so arm yourself.

A better world is possible #

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. 1974.

Le Guin's science fiction novel imagines a society of anarcho-syndicalists living on Anarres, a moon to the planet Urras. It's not a perfect utopia by any means, and we see much of it in contrast to capitalist Urras where the main character travels. One of the most interesting things about Anarres is that it's not a post-scarcity society. In fact, survival on Anarres is difficult, and yet the people manage to live together without hoarding or domination. I found The Dispossessed both inspiring and hopeful. Hopelessness forecloses even imagining the possibility for change for the better. The Dispossessed widened my horizon of imagination and helps me escape that trap.